Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday April 23, 2014 @09:55AM
from the end-times dept.

An anonymous reader writes "On 3 February 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) issued the remaining five /8 address blocks, each containing 16.7 million addresses, in the global free pool equally to the five RIRs, and as such ARIN is no longer able to receive additional IPv4 resources from the IANA. After yesterday's large allocation (104.64.0.0/10) to Akamai, the address pool remaining to be assigned by ARIN is now down to the last /8. This triggers stricter allocation rules and marks the end of general availability of new IPv4 addresses in North America. ARIN thus follows the RIRs of Asia, Europe and South America into the final phase of IPv4 depletion."

ISPs will just use more carrier grade NAT to free up IPs, maybe charge a little extra if you want your own IP outside of NAT to run game servers or skype or whatever (a relatively small group). Should hold of IPv6 for another 10 years or so.

And hopefully more large companies and organizations that hold large blocks of public IP addresses will start moving to private IP addresses and release the public IP addresses for use by others. I know some places that have large numbers of systems with public IP addresses that are behind firewalls and really have no business having a public IP address on those systems anymore.

That would have about as much effect as pissing into the ocean would have on raising sea levels.

That isn't completely true due to the high degree of leveraging that can occur with NAT. It only takes a relatively small number of public addresses to service millions of private IP client addresses. There are very large numbers of private IP addresses being wasted. One properly used Class A block could allow you to service many billions of client computers.

Why would they release anything? The more time passes, the more they are worth. They have all the incentive to sit on them as long as possible, and only sell for $$$. If they can't resell, still no reason to release, where would they get more afterwards if they need them?

Because if you are "Public-facing" you need to be able to speak to the maximum number of users for your service to stand a chance of being successful. To do that if you have to you need to choose the more common "language", right now that is still IPv4. You can argue the technical merits of going full IPv6 all you want (I have more than I care to admit), but at the end of the day if your product doesn't make money you will be out of business long before IPv4 vs IPv6 becomes a serious problem.

To hyperbolically extend your argument, pretend you looking for an embedded systems kernel developer. Applicant A has worked on projects with hundreds of thousands of lines of PHP, so you should hire A because she can google it. Having direct knowledge is sometimes helpful.

One of my peeves with IPv6 is that in v4 I had over 16 million legal loopback addresses out of only 4 billion addresses; now in v6 I have exactly one out of a much larger pool. It is not often useful, but it isn't always useless to use more than one of the loopback addresses on a host.

I would have preferred loopback to be a/64 rather than a/128 in IPv6: it's not like the address-space is too small to afford it.

These addresses were allocated in the age before The Great IP Shortage. There were no signs that the internet would be used privately by regular people and many sysadmins were clueless as to how IP networking worked. NAT routers were incredibly expensive and the right way to go was to just buy an IP block, distribute it globally across branches and use the router to block traffic from other IP blocks. All major companies in the eighties bought IP blocks, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org] . Ofcourse many

Others such as Eli Lily or the UK Gov Dept of Pensions really don't need so many addresses

Someone in the UK government pointed that out recently - it turns out that "Dept of Pensions" allocation is actually used across most of the government as some sort of VPN extranet with various external contractors. Apparently, since they all use different RFC1918 blocks internally, they can't all be VPNed into any single RFC1918 block: they needed a globally-unique block for that purpose.

Yes, there's profit in scarcity. CGN/CGNAT also has a nice effect in breaking P2P which frees up the bandwidth they've been long seeking anyways. For them, IPv4 is a win-win-win all around.

With regards to IPv6, I expect mobile phones to adopt it this standard more rapidly than your standard PC/Server market for home and business use. With the exception of IPv6 facing web servers of course.

Comcast is in the unusual position that they are so damn big they have run out of space in net10 leaving them with two painful options, move to IPv6 or "federate" their network so they can reuse the same private IPs in different places.

The odds of us ever actually "transitioning" to IPv6 are somewhere between slim and none for the foreseeable future. The most likely way it will work out is mobile applications (where it doesn't matter what you're using because it's a mobile phone that mates only to the provider's network) will be mostly IPv6 before too long, if they aren't already. Some consumer ISPs may move customers to IPv6, but that will be somewhat delayed by the incredibly slow pace that content providers are switching to IPv6--that

I know from research papers that both the USA, Germany and Canada's mobile networks are NAT too (USA seems to be split in east/west NAT's for some providers).From personal tests, the Netherlands are NAT too.

Once home / small business switch over the content providers are going to be virtualized. Which means that service will stop working, geolocation being the first to go. They'll lose the ability to meaningfully regulate traffic (everything is coming from West Virginia). It is fairly east to switch most websites over. Most consumer content will switch with a few years of the carriers being ready.

And best yet, ISP’s will have an excuse to charge you extra for not-upgrading their infrastructure so you can continue to do what you already do for additional cost and no material improvements to your service. Brilliant!

Pretty outrageous that the whole of North America has to go on a diet earlier because Akamai somehow needs a whole fucking/10.

ARIN's behavior has made it clear: you can get all the IPs you want as long as you're a big guy paying big fees. But a small company asking for a/22? Go away, small businesses don't deserve to be able to do business.

RIR's general policy is if you can prove you require it, you can have it. Akamai clearly have the documentation to prove that they will burn through an entire/10 within a reasonable time frame (It was 3 months at the end in the RIPE region. I'm unsure about ARIN).

Akamai are huge. They claim to provide 15-30% of all web traffic (http://www.akamai.com/html/about/facts_figures.html). Stands to reason that they will likely utilise that all fairly quickly.

Years back, my boss got a whole class C for a company with ~5 employees and network footprint nothing more than one website. Maybe they can get some of the corporations with class As to give some back? (yeah yeah I know)

Nope, it takes longer for existing tenants to vacate space than it has been for ARIN to allocate new addresses (ie it would take MIT 5 years to re-engineer their network to free up say half of their allocation, but at the rate we've been using new addresses that space would last less than 10 days, so why should an organization put in 5 years of work to help with 10 days of usage?) so the solution is IPv6.

ie it would take MIT 5 years to re-engineer their network to free up say half of their allocation

I call BS, it would only take that long if it was a low priority job. If they were told in no uncertain terms to sort it out or be kicked out of the internet I'm sure they could deal with it much quicker than that.

It might be possible for HP, Apple, or Xerox to move things around that quickly but I doubt a University could get that done at any priority.

I know people who work on university networks. They face the most bizare requirements. At Michigan for instance essentially any two ports anywhere on the entire campus have to be able to be made layer 2 adjacent upon request.

Big research universities like MIT have odd problems like academics doing "network research" collaborating with different colleges withing the u

With IPv6 they are trying to allocate blocks in such a way that they almost never have to give a network a second block that is not continguous with it's initial block. So it should hopefully convege much closer to one block per multihomed network than IPv4 has.

Still the number of multihomed networks is only going to grow over time and whatever you do each such network is going to want at least one entry in the global routing table.

Years back, my boss got a whole class C for a company with ~5 employees and network footprint nothing more than one website. Maybe they can get some of the corporations with class As to give some back? (yeah yeah I know)

This comes at cost of increased route disaggregation pressure for little benefit in return.

That is pretty common an usual pretty much the smallest direct allocation you can get. Nobody will route anything smaller than that. Lots of ISP will subnet C allocations and resell smaller ranges, but than they are not your allocation so if you change ISPs you WILL be changing ip address ( for all be a few edge cases if that is really a problem than you are doing it wrong), what sucks through is it usually becomes a pain to get pointer records in DNS updated etc; as you need to get whoever controls the z

A bit curious as to how you intend to look at the BGP tables and tell that a block is not in use? I understand maybe do a swap ips to make up a larget block to "defrag" the ip space but that requires at least one of the parties has enough free space to perform the swap (something that is going to become even harder to get as time goes on).

Also what concession do you give to an ISP having multiple internet links of which I want half my ips to use link A and the other half using link B? This problem gets even

People are greedy, even with something as seemingly simple as reclaiming unneeded addresses.

So why not use the greed to your advantage? Charge $10/ip and see how quickly they give back the ones they aren't using.ARIN could do the same thing. If ARIN charged just $1/ip per month you would see a huge influx of returning ips.

Except you can't if you were a LIR. And RIPE wanted you to be a LIR if you had more than/19. If you charged money for IPs and not for the internet service, RIPE could revoke all your addresses.

Most ISPs and even cloud providers seem to charge me for IPs. The price range anywhere from $1 per month per IPto as high as $20 per month per static IP sometimes even more as they will sometimes require you to upgrade to"business class" to have a static IP.

Relevant quote: "Remember our conclusion from the cartoon of one person per square meter; we concluded that zero population growth is going to happen. Let’s state that conclusion in other terms and say it’s obvious nature is going to choose from the right hand list and we don't have to do anything—except be prepared to live with whatever nature chooses from that right hand list. Or we can exercise the one option that’s open to us, and that option is to choose first from the right hand list. We gotta find something here we can go out and campaign for. Anyone here for promoting disease? (audience laughter)"

In this case, fortunately, it's extremely unlikely that violence and death will occur as a result of this specific resource exhaustion, but the study of human behavior in response to the resource shortage is telling.

We've been aware for years that zero IPv4 address availability is going to happen. It's absolutely certain. The only way to make it not happen, or not *care* that it happens, is to do something about the problem. But of course, even for such a technically manageable problem, humanity on the whole chooses to do nothing. The exact same thing will happen for fossil fuel exhaustion, arable land exhaustion, etc.

And now nature will choose for us from the right-hand list of IPv4 exhaustion: here comes corporate greed, lawsuits, slow and inconvenient CGNs (one bad actor in your ISP's network causes you to be banned from the services you use), etc.

Humans are hard-wired to be reactionary, not proactive -- and at that, only reactionary to immediate problems. "Oh, I can't get a new IPv4 address. What do I do?" or "Oh, I can get a new IPv4 address, but it's too expensive. What do I do?" -- These are the kinds of things we will start thinking about, and making people start to care. NOT "Oh, we better deal with this problem that is likely to happen in 5 years."

As flawed as we are, it's probably a good thing that we won't survive long enough to leave our solar system and populate the cosmos. We don't deserve it. We're just too *dumb* as a species.

There are no languages where grammar and pronounciation rules are completely consistent. Spanish and Indonesian come close with regards to grammar, and Dutch and Czech, when it comes to spelling vs. pronounciation, but there just is no language which is completely consistent. Even artificial languages like Esperanto have their inconsistencies.

Bulgarian doesn't even note emphasis in the writing, and also not the length of the vowels, thus it doesn't have a fully written pronounciation. It is still possible to follow the full set of pronounciation rules in Bulgarian and still read a text completely non-understandable for a native speaker.

It didn't matter whether it was last year or next...IP usage was accelerating into the wall anyway. The GOOD part about this is that now the US is out of addresses certain parts of the Internet industry are more likely to take IPv6 seriously.

Sadly, ISPs in other parts of the world have proven adept at further avoiding the problem by downgrading consumer connections to carrier-grade NAT, so we have another 5 years of eking out of old order before people REALLY have to take notice.

Now that addresses have run out, they have become a valuable resource for the ISPs that own them. If those ISPs implement IPv6 then there will be no shortage of addresses, and they will lose all their value.

So the monopolist ISPs will now do everything in their power to prevent IPv6 from being adopted.

so we have another 5 years of eking out of old order before people REALLY have to take notice.

Possiblly much more than that.

XP and andriod 2.x are dying. They aren't dead yet but in a few years time their relavence will likely have declined to the level where website operators think it reasonable to stop supporting their default browsers. Once that happens we will be able to use SNI (and tell the holdouts still on XP to "use firefox or chrome damnit")

Once that happens it will be possible to put multiple SSL websites behind one IP reducing the IP demand on the hosting side. With end lusers put behind

We're running out of free ones. And like any freely available resource, they've been squandered. Once the free supply is exhausted, they'll simply no longer be free - meaning that actual incentive will exist to conserve them and organizations will have incentive to sell unneeded blocks. Economics 101, people.

I doubt the organizations with those large blocks will sell them unless they become very expensive (which I don't think will happen for a long time). The costs of restructuring the network for a lot of these companies would far outweigh the gains.

What I see as far more likely is ISPs implementing carrier grade NAT as the default, and potentially charging a small fee for those who need a unique IP. The vast majority of users won't care, and as long as getting an IP if you run a game server or use skype or wh

This assumes that either the seller is allowed to split the block or the price per IP for a/8 is comparable to the price per IP for a/8 block is comparable to the price per IP for the much smaller blocks you see sold on that site.

We're running out of free ones. And like any freely available resource, they've been squandered. Once the free supply is exhausted, they'll simply no longer be free - meaning that actual incentive will exist to conserve them and organizations will have incentive to sell unneeded blocks. Economics 101, people.

Why would you choose that option when we have a way of bypassing it? Isn't progress generally about creating plenty? We have the ability to create plenty, and not have to deal with buying and selling IP addresses. Just because you can create a market doesn't mean you should.

Because there is a very high one-time-only cost involved in switching to ipv6, compared to a small running continuous cost of continuing in ipv4, and for now, it is advantageous to become in ipv4. No one wants to be the one to switch first.

Just think of all sort of problems large ISPs will have to deal in terms of support if they switch to ipv6, in terms of phone service, visits, substitution of cable modems, support for old machines running none/bogus ipv6 implementation.

Because there is a very high one-time-only cost involved in switching to ipv6, compared to a small running continuous cost of continuing in ipv4, and for now, it is advantageous to become in ipv4. No one wants to be the one to switch first.

Nobody is switching to IPv6 they are *adding* IPv6. IPv4 is not being turned off by anyone well into the foreseeable future.

Most large content providers are already offering service via IPv6 and millions already have IPv6 access via their ISPs.

Just think of all sort of problems large ISPs will have to deal in terms of support if they switch to ipv6, in terms of phone service, visits, substitution of cable modems, support for old machines running none/bogus ipv6 implementation

The migration to IPv6 takes a while and does not involve turning off IPv4 anytime soon. There is no need to rush to replace gear. It will eventually break or become obsolete in the next few years anyway.

Because people will do what is individally best for them, not what is best for the community as a whole.

If I want to run a server for the general public to access over the internet it needs to have an IPv4 address until such time as the vast majority of clients can reliablly access IPv6 servers (I would not consider teredo to be "reliable", it's overcomplicated and fights against NAT rather than working with it).

Similarly if I want my users to be able to access resources on the public internet I need IPv4 a

We're running out of free ones. And like any freely available resource, they've been squandered. Once the free supply is exhausted, they'll simply no longer be free - meaning that actual incentive will exist to conserve them and organizations will have incentive to sell unneeded blocks. Economics 101, people.

There has been pressure for near two decades now in the form of allocation policy and documentation requirements where lack of plentiful IP resources has lead directly to proliferation of 1:Many NAT.

Newer mobile phones should have been IPv6 from the beginning. China mandated that years ago. T-Mobile is IPv6. (You can supposedly open up an end to end IPv6 connection between two T-Mobile phones). It's suprising that the cellular phone companies didn't fix this, since they have control of both network and handset.

The phone companies themselves don't always control the handsets. Yes, they supply phones as part of a contract package but there are also a lot of people (like me) who got a phone from elsewhere and brought it on to the network.

Think of it. Here is this scare resource, IPv4 addresses, and no more are going to be allocated in North America. I see great potential in profit, online exchanges opening up allowing the trading of IP addresses, etc. etc. To quote the Ferengi, my lobes are tingling.

Hey, now that Intel is trying to sell quarks [intel.com] NICs, we could be looking at a real crunch in the IPv6 space... (and, at a tray price of over $9/unit, large atoms and even most molecules becoming enormously expensive.)

ISPs NEED to provide their customers with the ability to access resources on the IPv4 internet from end devices that only support IPv4. For most ISPs (massive ones that have problems with running out of private v4 space excepted) who can't give all their customers public IPs the easiest way to achive that will be to deploy NAT44. Once they have deployed the NAT44 there is no real pressure to get arround to deploying IPv6 as well.

285 million addresses reserved for no compelling reason. sure, let's push onwards to ipv6, but saying "our hands are tied" when over 1/16th of the entire space is still available is a bit irritating.

Would you want to be the guy who pokes every existing and legacy system that makes stupid and/or dangerous assumptions about reserved blocks being reserved permanently? You'd hope that that wouldn't be an issue; but finding out could be exciting indeed.

I don't think that is a good technical solution. First of all, after everyone decides how best to change to protocol to use extended addresses, you still have the same problem of having to upgrade existing equipment. You say that is is just a "trivial mod," but it's not like implementing IPv6 is particularly difficult---rolling out any modification whatsoever will be about as hard as switching to IPv6. However, with your suggestion, the situation is must less predicatable for users during the transition

Every fix length field should have a reserved value for an extension..

Without careful planning in advance of deployment reserved fields in protocols often go unused as subsequent modifications are not operationally viable.

Variable length addressing would have absolutely solved the problem only if it was defined from the beginning addresses may be between x and y bits in length and all systems handling addresses are expected to support the full range of address lengths.

The act of simply reserving a bit without defining what it does in advance solves NOTHING and does NOT result